1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to educational machines, and more particularly, to educational machines for sequentially receiving and ejecting cards having information on both sides.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Systems of educational cards, each card having a question on its front side and a corresponding answer on its back side, are commonly used by teachers and parents in the course of teaching activities directed to their students or children. Such systems of educational cards are especially useful in teaching certain subjects, such as spelling, arithmetic, and word/object identification to small children. A large number of such cards may be arranged or programmed in a predetermined sequence to improve the efficiency of learning of a particular category of subject matter by teaching the subject matter to a child in a logical sequence. However, use of educational cards alone as an educational tool has been found to have certain difficulties. For example, some children, if not closely supervised during their use of the above educational tools, may "cheat" by looking quickly at the answer on the back side of a particular card without making any mental effort to recall or cognitively determine the correct answer to a question presented on the front side of the card. This, of course, reduces the benefits of using the educational cards. Another shortcoming of using educational cards alone is that certain children may tend to become bored by the task of merely looking at the question at the front of a card, trying to answer the question, and then turning the card over to determine the correct answer. Such children may be prone to mixing the cards up, tearing or otherwise defacing the cards. A variety of devices have been devised for use in conjunction with educational cards of the type described above in order to make use of the educational cards more interesting and fascinating to children and to facilitate maintaining the cards in a predetermined order.
A preliminary search directed to the present invention uncovered U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,385,623, 3,154,863 and 4,053,994. The device disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,053,994 comes closest to solving the above mentioned shortcomings of using educational cards alone, and is a relatively inexpensive device. While use of the device disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,053,994 tends to make the task of studying a group of educational cards more fascinating to a child, it does not prevent the child from "cheating" by quickly flipping a particular card over to determine the answer without any mental effort before inserting the card into the upper slot of the disclosed device. There presently exists an unmet need for an educational machine which facilitates use of educational cards by children in order to prevent the children from looking at the answer side of each card without making a suitable amount of mental effort to recall or cognitively determine the correct answer to a question set forth on the front side of that card.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to provide a low cost, easy to use educational device for facilitating use of educational cards by children.
It is another object of the invention to provide an educational machine for use with educational cards which reduces the amount of necessary supervision of small children using the educational cards.
Still another object of the invention is to provide an educational machine for use with educational cards which makes it more difficult for students using the educational cards to determine answers to questions set forth on the educational cards without making a suitable amount of cognative effort to determine the correct answers.